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It's 10 years now since Amfac crowned the first Hawaii Business Top 250 with Henry Walker Jr. ruling its boardroom, 10 years since the Arakawa family's Waipahu store cordoned off the bottom, a tenuous No. 250 at $7 million in sales. The intervening years and a near-miracle economy that left them behind while it fattened competitors have irrevocably transformed Hawaii's highest business echelons. Walker's Big Five conglomerate, a tenacious chart topper, was finally shunted aside in 198 struggling with heavy losses: in 199l, privatized, it disappeared from the ranking, only to resurface last year just below Costco Wholesale.
That's transformation: Amfac under a warehouse whose best deli seller is the 48-ounce jar of kim chee. And this turn of events while David Murdock's Dole Food Co.-the toppler of Amfac and top of the tenth Top 250--used these intervening years to double sales to $3.3 billion and, in the process, really take pineapple off Lanai.
What are we to read into these contrasts? They attest to the corporate strategies and fortunes of two high-ranking leaders and indicate broad directions of the local economy. But other stories, and subtler stories, are told in the footnotes of a decade of Top 250s. A glimpse at some facets of the evolution of Hawaii business:
1984: Data bases used as sources for the debut edition of the Top 250 turn up Bishop Baldwin Rewald Dillingham & Wong. Uncovered as a phony investment scheme in 1983, the bogus company would swallow up to $12 million of investors' money and even 10 years later make the name of its imprisoned principal, Ron Rewald, synonymous with the word scam.
More admired is kamaaina executive Frannie Morgan's purchase that year of Hamakua Sugar from his boss, Theo. H. Davies. The Hong Kong-owned conglomerate's enthusiasm for sugar is waning when Morgan takes out loans to buy the $88-million plantation two Davies uses part of the money to buy Pizza Hut franchises. Two years later, Hamakua Sugar debuts on the Top 250 at No. 47 with $56 million in sales.
1985: David Murdock's merger of Castle & Cooke with his FlexiVan Corp. saves the Big Five company from bankruptcy The Californian's regard for Hawaii was is evinced the following year in a directive banning aloha shirts...